Thursday, March 18, 2010

Matthew Yglesias has put up a list of ten books that have been important influences in how he thinks about things. I can do that, too. Except, one problem: when it comes to my thinking--particularly stuff relevant to the political, philosophical, or otherwise intellectual thinking that I went to school for eleven years for--the reading that has influenced me most has usually come in the form of a journal or magazine article (or lately, a blog post). I'm not particularly proud of that, but that's the truth (and I suspect it's true for most academics as well).

So herewith, an attempt to be rigorous, and focus only on the books (though more than a few of them are collections of essays or articles). That means I'm leaving out some essays that profoundly influenced me, but you've got to put your boundaries somewhere. Also, I'm sticking with stuff that I read and which influenced me while I was forming my intellectual academic foundation, meaning the years from 1987 to 2001, with a two-year break in there while I was gallivanting around South Korea. (That means Tolkien is out!) And also, I'm going to have to go to fifteen, because I'm just verbose that way. In alphabetical order:

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Essays like "What is Freedom?" and "What is Authority?" gave me an entirely different way of thinking about democracy and liberty--or, at least, gave me a language for expressing what I had already been thinking about for a while.

F.M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism. The first--and, as yet, the only--complete and published study of Herder's political ideas that I ever read, and, as much as I in time came to disagree with some elements of Barnard's interpretations of his subject, his account Herder's romantic contribution to a historicized but still morally truthful account of culture and language still draws me in--much more than Herder's own actual writings do.

Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought. Came at a time in my education when my studies of Herder had convinced me that the struggle between the Aufklärer and the advocates of Counter-Enlightenment told the only philosophical story really worth knowing. I grew out of that obsession eventually, but this book and others like it gave me a historical context for understanding my own nascent romantic and/or hermeneutic approaches to political life, cultural identity, and religious truth.

Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. A slim book, but packed with provocative ideas. By treating Confucian ritual teachings as religious and "magical," Fingarette helped my anthropological and ideological interest in East Asian philosophy become a moral one as well.

David C. Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking Through Confucius. The first in a series of books which Hall and Ames wrote together, exploring--sometimes in a phenomenological, sometimes in a Deweyesque manner--the application of Confucius's Analects to essential philosophical questions from the Western tradition: the nature of truth, the purpose of society, the cultivation of the self. Helped give me a basic orientation as to how I wanted to make use of all these notions I'd brought back with me from East Asia.

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. Like much of Heidegger's writings (yes, I did try to read Being and Time; I got about a third of the way through) some of the essays are opaque and overwrought. But some of them--"The Letter on Humanism," "The Question Concerning Technology," "The Way to Language," for example--had a transformative impact on how I understood our way as human beings of perceiving and constructing both reality and society.

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Nowadays, I would probably put Marx's "On the Jewish Question" as the most important bit of Marxist thought in my own thinking. But at the time, actually reading, carefully and thoughtfully, through the Manifesto was a bit of a revelation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau's Political Writings. I don't use this edition in my own work or my teaching any more, but it's the collection that kicked-started my own engagement with communitarian thought, though I didn't call it that at the time. Much of what I still believe about equality and modernity can be traced back to The Second Discourse, the first work of political philosophy I ever took seriously.

Nicholas H. Smith, Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. Helped me put Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, and many others together and draw out the fundamentals of their insights; and by so doing, it helped focus my interest in developing a kind of "conservative" approach to culture and identity which did not fall into a literalist or natural law trap.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. The single heaviest, sustained philosophical argument I have ever taken myself through, and far and away the most influential in how I think about the relationship between truth claims and the historical and cultural narratives they are invariably embedded in.

Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation. A book about political theory, but it had a huge impact on how I, as a religious believer, took the hermeneutical arguments I'd come to accept and constructed them as part of the moral engagement I wanted to have with the world.

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. Presented a way of thinking about "liberalism" and "conservatism" in the American context that I don't think anyone has yet been able to refute. More than that, it's also a tour de force, linking the history of America, the nature of rhetoric, and the meaning of democracy and constitutionalism together into a single, succinct argument.

Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Like a deeply planted time bomb, this book's various observations and arguments (mostly about Tocqueville and the Federalists and Anti-Federalists) kept coming to me, suddenly making sense, while thinking about community or politics or government or religion or philosophy or just about anything else, years and years after my advisor first recommended it to me.

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Helped me see why republican ideas and language mattered, why those ideas gave rise modern democracy, and why the rise of democracy would mean means republicanism's inevitable fall. I don't fully agree, but it's an argument I can't shake, and which I make use of in my classes to this day.

On a different day, I'd probably come up with a slightly different list, but I think this hits all the big, influential books in my intellectual genealogy. Obviously, it reveals my graduate school interests: communitarianism, pluralism, comparative and American and the history of political thought. Nothing much there hinting at my later interests in socialism, populism, or localism. Even on it's own terms, I'm not terribly proud of the list: not enough original sources, and too much commentary on what others have said. Also, for someone who got a PhD in political philosophy in the 1990s, it's kind of sad to admit that big books by Rawls, Sandel, Young, Kymlicka, Rorty, Walzer, Okin, Rosenblum, Cohen, etc., just didn't move me as much as the (mostly more specialized) books above did, or as much as the smaller articles and secondary literature these thinkers produced did. But that's the way in happened, for better or worse.

14 comments:

Interesting. I'm surprised not to see Spheres of Justice on there, knowing what I know of your views. The Confucius is interesting, too. You should try to watch the Confucius action movie if/when it's available on DVD or in theaters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgiM1ubNCYc

This one shows the action more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVUDzsi4t6Y&feature=related

I've not read much confucious or serious commentary, but I've always had a soft spot for the analects.

What have you read from Marx and Rousseau? I've read some Johnson and think he's mostly crap. (That's certainly his reputation among historians.) My impression of that book is that he mistakes showing that Marx and Rousseau were unpleasant people (we know this about Rousseau from his own writings- Johnson doesn't even show much that's new) with criticism of their ideas. But only an idiot would think that's a valid argument. That this was so is why no one who knows anything about Marx or Rousseau thinks Johnson's work is of use as anything more than a bit of voyeurism. But I'm pretty sure you don't know anything about Marx or Rousseau, so it's no surprise you don't know this.

I have to agree with Matt, Aloysius. Johnson's overwhelming argument, from what I can recall of it (it's been years since I read the book) is that those he deems "intellectuals" are 1) creepy and 2) occasionally stupid. Pointing out another person's creepiness and occasional boneheadedness makes for great gossip. But it does not actually explain why the ideas themselves are not worth serious consideration. I suppose if you believe that every individual labeled an "intellectual" expects others to embrace their arguments on the basis of their sterling moral worth, then Johnson's argument carries some weight. But given the fact that, to use your own examples, both Marx and Rousseau spent most of their productive lives in flight from any kind of personally empowering social situation, I'm not sure how showing that either of them were jerks or made some stupid decisions counts for much of anything, argument-wise.

Creation of the American Republic is probably Wood's magnum opus, Dave; I'll grant you that. It, along with Bailyn's and Pocock's big books, changed the whole way republicanism was perceived as part of American history. But I like Radicalism best, because I think it's explanations are less troubled by an attempt to put the whole meaning of America into a world-historical gestalt. I don't think he's reading Jacksonianism too far back into American history; I think he's just rightly, persuasively connecting the ideological dots, between the democratic impulses of the confederal/post-revolutionary era (1770s and 80s) with those which emerged even more strongly with the triumph over the Federalists in the early 1800s.

Loads of stuff I admire, and one I'd put on my own list (sort of)--Rousseau's Social Contract. But I am surprised to see so many many secondary sources. No text by Herder himself? No classic in Christian thought? No novels?

I'm glad that Rousseau impressed you as well, Jeremiah. As for your complaint, I feel its force. I confessed in the post that I was somewhat embarrassed to admit that relatively few primary sources--Plato's Republic, Augustine's City of God, Hobbes's Leviathan, etc.--had as serious an impact on my thinking as did secondary sources about them. (Though I can partly defend myself by further confessing that most of them don't meet my "actually read cover-to-cover" criteria; I've never read all of the Augustine or Hobbes, for example.) Herder I don't feel bad about admitting the truth, though--he's a fascinating thinker, but he's just damn hard to read, and much clearer when one focuses on his shorter essays or just selected excerpts. As for novels and other more popular writing...well, I got into this groove where I was focusing on the shaping of my "professional" mind while going to school, and that meant the fiction and essays which really have influenced me--from Orwell to Nibley--got left out. Maybe another, differently focused list would include them.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."